The Editor Who Discovered the Stars

When Jack Prelutsky first walked into editor Susan Hirschman's office at Macmillan in 1964, he had no idea he was a poet. He enjoyed drawing funny creatures he invented for his own amusement, and he wrote accompanying verses for them. "In two hours I wrote two dozen verses to accompany drawings that took me six months to do," says Prelutsky.

His friend Mike Thaler talked him into showing his drawings to legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom at Harper, and when she turned them down, Thaler suggested that he try Hirschman, who had just left Harper to work at Macmillan. "I was 23, an enfant terrible who probably weighed 130 pounds," remembers Prelutsky. "I had a beard and unwashed hair but Susan was incredibly gracious. She sat me down and began to read, and then she said: 'Well, you're very talented and we'd like to publish you.' I was stunned. 'You mean you like my drawings?' I asked her, and she said, 'Oh, no! You're the worst artist I've ever seen. But you have a natural gift here.'

"To this day, I don't understand what she saw in those rhymes. But she sees things in people other editors miss."

While Hirschman didn't publish any of the poems Prelutsky brought in that day, she encouraged him to keep writing, suggesting he try writing some poems about real animals. They met weekly for close to a year so that Hirschman could keep tabs on his progress.

"She had a drawer just for me," Prelutsky recalls. "I'd write six poems and she'd throw out five and keep one. And then she'd take me to lunch at a really nice restaurant and it'd be the only good meal I'd have that week."

It was the beginning of a friendship and professional relationship that has continued to this day, though they now live on opposite sides of the continent. Prelutsky continues, "When she calls, I recognize her voice instantly, and I just feel better. Sometimes she calls just to say, 'You got a good review.' That's the sort of thing that people my age who've been writing so long are not that concerned with any more. But Susan still gets excited about it. She has so much enthusiasm. I'm going to miss her tremendously."

Prelutsky is referring to Hirschman's retirement next month after 47 years as a children's book editor, first at Harper and then at Macmillan, before she established her own imprint, Greenwillow Books, in 1974. The announcement of her retirement came as a surprise to many in the publishing industry, who regard her as a woman in her prime, much too young to retire. When asked why she has chosen to retire at this point in her career, Hirschman responds with characteristic wry simplicity: "I'll be 70. That seemed like a nice round number."

"It will certainly be a strange business without her," says Richard Jackson, who now has his own imprint at Simon and Schuster. "My lord, she is children's publishing!" Such high praise would most likely embarrass Hirschman, who is always quick to give other people—authors, artists, coworkers, and readers—the credit for her success. In talking to her, it's obvious that her great skill as an editor is in drawing things out of other people. Her passion for her work is also obvious. Hirschman is extremely witty and quick to laugh, but she is also quick to moan when she regards something as phony or just plain stupid. She dislikes, for example, what she calls "one-joke" picture books and children's books written to appeal to adults.

"There's a certain forthrightness about her," says Jackson, who as a young editor worked with Hirschman in the early 1960s. "She knows her own mind, which is awfully good and awfully helpful to someone who is young. When I first started working with her, I once brought her a manuscript by a well-known author. She took it home and read it, and brought it back and said: 'But does it convince you?' and I thought, 'Oh, boy, that is the question,' but I hadn't thought to ask it. She planted in my mind a single question that has been there ever since and which is really important to the way I look at books."

The two were working together at Macmillan when Janet Schulman, who was then working in Macmillan's marketing department, encouraged a college friend named Virginia Hamilton to submit a story to them. "Janet remembered stories I'd written in college and was very persistent, until I dug out the first one and submitted it," recalls Hamilton. That 20-page short story was accepted by Macmillan and eventually became Hamilton's first novel, Zeely, edited by Jackson. When he left the company shortly afterward, Hirschman took over as Hamilton's editor.

"She was a great editor, one of the best, because she was a teacher," says Hamilton. "I knew nothing early on. I didn't know very much at all about writing children's books, but I suppose I had a natural flair for story. She was wonderful in that she never told me what to write or how to write, but she would say, 'Between this line and that line there's a whole paragraph' or 'On the next page is another chapter,' and I'd have to go off and think about it."

It was a time of great creative growth for Hamilton, who, in her years with Hirschman, experimented with style in groundbreaking novels such as The Planet of Junior Brown, Arilla Sun Down, and the Newbery-winning M.C. Higgins the Great. In the mid-1970s, Hamilton gave voice to a distinctly African-American world view in children's literature, with writing that can perhaps be best compared today to the adult novels of Toni Morrison.

Both Prelutsky and Hamilton were among the many authors who followed Hirschman when she left Macmillan in the midst of a bitter strike in 1974, and went to Morrow to establish Greenwillow Books, her own imprint. Hirschman's longtime friend and colleague George Nicholson, now a senior literary agent with Sterling Lord Literistic, remembers the time well.

"After a period of time at Macmillan, she couldn't develop her own ideas in the way that she wanted and she walked out with all her staff," he says. "I remember the picketing that went on—that's pretty bold stuff for children's book people who are supposed to be happy in the back room. She fought publicly to be doing the kind of publishing she thought she should be doing, and for the treatment of her artists. She brought her whole staff to Greenwillow, something that was very unusual at that time."

The creative team, which included art director Ava Weiss, who is still with Greenwillow, and editors Ada Shearon and Elizabeth Shub, worked with Hirschman to turn Greenwillow into one of the most highly respected children's publishers today. Their creative vision is simple: they publish for children, first and foremost, always resisting the temptation to appeal instead to adult tastes. Together they built an impressive list of authors and artists who share that vision, including Donald Crews, Chris Crutcher, Sid Fleisch- man, Tana Hoban, Pat Hutchins, Ann Jonas, Diana Wynne Jones, Betty Levin, Anita Lobel, Robin McKinley, Lynn Reiser, James Stevenson, and Vera B. Williams. When asked what she looks for in a book, Hirschman responds: "I want something that's worth reading, worth saying, and worth the tree that was cut down for it to be printed on. If we're talking about younger books, I want it to be something that when a child finishes it, she says, 'Read it again.' I look for books that are honest, have emotional content, and that are truly books for children."

Given Hirschman's criteria for a satisfying book, she and Kevin Henkes seem like they were made for one another. From an early age, Henkes knew that he wanted to write and illustrate children's books. In 1980, when he was just 19, he went to New York, specifically hoping to show his work to Hirschman because he wanted to be published by Greenwillow. In the months prior to his visit, he had carefully researched the current publishing scene at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Children's Book Center, and was especially drawn to the books published by Greenwillow. "They were distinguished and the art was beautiful, but they really were for kids," he says. "They didn't seem to be nostalgic or sentimental. I remember Freight Train and Good Morning Chick and Ben's Trumpet—they all seemed to be the kind of picture book I wanted to do at the time. So Susan was my first choice, and I was really lucky in that she decided she wanted to publish me."

Although Henkes saw himself first as an author and illustrator of picture books, it wasn't long before Hirschman encouraged him to try other sorts of writing. "There's nothing harder than to write a picture book," observes Hirschman, "So many authors who do write good picture books are good writers, and there's no reason why they shouldn't write a novel." While spending a week in New York City, Henkes visited the Greenwillow offices to deliver the finished art for his second book, Clean Enough. At the time he was working on his third picture book, a story about a brother and sister. Hirschman asked him, "Do you know any more about these two kids?" Before the week was over, Henkes had written the text for an easy chapter book, Margaret and Taylor. He had spent the entire week working in an empty office at Greenwillow, each successive chapter inspired by Hirschman repeating her simple question: "Do you know any more?"

At that time she told him, "I think you should try writing longer books. Write more." And while his first effort at writing a full-length novel was never published, she sent him an encouraging letter that he can still quote: "I've never doubted that you're a real writer so the fact that you're writing a real novel comes as no surprise."

"I carried that letter with me everywhere I went, folded in my pocket," Henkes says. Hirschman's confidence in him has obviously paid off, as he has published many children's novels since then, including Words of Stone and Protecting Marie.

Novelist Jessie Haas started her career at Greenwillow at around the same time Henkes did. On the advice of her adviser at Wellesley College, Haas submitted a manuscript to Greenwillow in 1981."I got a really fabulous rejection letter from Ann Tobias, who worked there at the time, which told me what I had done well and what I hadn't done well, and that if I revised it, they would like to see it again," she says. Soon after Haas sent in her revision, she was paged by her dormitory's bell desk. It was Hirschman, telling Haas she wanted to publish her book and that Greenwillow was going to pay her a $2,000 advance. "Now hang up and call your mother," Hirschman told her.

After her first two novels and a collection of short stories, however, Haas suffered a long dry spell. When Hirschman rejected her third novel, Haas decided to try her luck with an agent who, it turns out, wasn't interested in taking her on. At that time, Hirschman told her, "Well, if it's money you need, we'll give you an open contract. We think you'll do another book that we'll want to publish, and we're ready to give you an advance on it."

"It was a tremendous expression of faith," says Haas, "because at that time I had submitted many, many really bad manuscripts. It was wonderful. It really, pulled me up out of the depths." She has since published 18 more novels with Greenwillow.

While Haas's experience was atypical in the publishing world at the time, it was apparently not unusual at Greenwillow. This sort of experience undoubtedly accounts for the remarkable loyalty so many Greenwillow authors and artists have shown over the years. Hirschman herself says: "I think if you create an atmosphere of trust on both sides and if you can give the creative person security, let them know that you believe in them and that you want to publish them over the long haul, then you can turn something down. Because everybody does an occasional book that isn't good but you're not turning them down. You're turning the project down."

When Hirschman retires in August, she'll be leaving Greenwillow entirely in the capable hands of Virginia Duncan, with whom she has worked for the past three and half years. "It's been one of the joys of my life to work with her," says Hirschman, "and I've learned a great deal from her because, young as she is, she's worked much longer than I have in corporate situations, so she knows a lot more about the new ways than I do. I love saying to her, 'Did I ever tell you about...' until I've told her every story in my head from the old days.

"I was trying to think in retrospect about all these years and all I can come up with is that I've had such a good time. It's just been a nice way to spend the days. It's very soul satisfying. I like the people. I like the end product. I do think it matters what children read. I like looking at the books when they come out and thinking, 'Yes, that is worth reading!'"